Alex Crowe

If I could read Helen Garner all day every day, I’d regard it as a life well-lived. I revere all her writing, but it’s her non-fiction I return to most and, to distil it further, for me it’s her diaries that show her to be the absolute killer writer that she is. I think it was speaking of Elizabeth Strout that Hilary Mantel said she had a prose style of such lucidity it was a moral virtue in itself, and that’s exactly how I feel about Garner. All three diaries are now available in the UK in a single volume (they’re actually published here tomorrow, the 13th, by @wnbooks) and in them is revealed, in sometimes agonising detail, the life of a writer, of a woman, of a person so vividly engaged with both the everyday and moral struggle of just being in the world. Her gift simply for paying attention is – to use a horribly blurby word – just luminous. She may not be as widely read here as she is in her native Australia, but she bloody well should be!